In the debate over AB 374 --- the "California Compassionate Choices Act" now being considered in the State Legislature --- "choice" is the favorite word used by its proponents.

"Compassionate choice" is a phrase offered to camouflage the frightening unintended consequences of the bill. More legislators are buying the argument and the media is taking the lead in this rising pressure for the creation of a new right - the "right to die" and the concept of "death with dignity."

What is ominous is that the voices of those most in danger from its impact - the terminally ill and people with disabilities --- are increasingly written off as "right wing," "reactionary" or simply muffled because the experience of disability and dying are most misunderstood and maligned.

As a person with a disability who survived polio and still living with chronic illness, I am aware of how fluid medical and political labels are. I am a "person with a disability" protected by the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) of 1990. Discrimination against someone like me is an actionable civil rights violation.

And yet, very quickly, should I get sick from the consequences of my disability and/or other causes, I can easily slip into being a "person with a terminal illness," lose my ADA protections as a disabled person and possibly be quietly put away by a well-thought-out and smart manipulation of the system, if AB 374 becomes law. And when that happens, neither the ADA nor even the standard protections from the actionable crime of killing can save my life.

It is utterly frightening for us with severe disabilities who are often chronically ill because a slight deterioration in our health can easily be manipulated to mean "terminal." When it becomes all right to withhold medical care or compromise medical therapies because the recipient is terminally ill as opposed only to chronically ill, it is an act of discrimination under the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990.

Under AB 374, however, someone is able to make a judgment to provide or not to provide treatment based on the supposed line between who is "chronically" as opposed to "terminally" ill. The difference between the two is in fact, relative in the context of the ever-changing and ever improving therapies and cures provided by science and medicine.

I knew that something was up when I noticed a qualitative difference in the way I was getting my medical care. A few years back, when I went to the hospital very sick, I got immediate and aggressive attention until I was well. When I moved to an HMO system, I was given 15-minute sessions and sent home with a prescription. One definitive experience came one day when I went for a routine check-up, I was asked by a doctor, "If you come down with pneumonia, Lillibeth, would you want me to put a trach on you?"

The question surprised me; why was it even an issue now? Was it not routine anymore to save my life by opening up my throat so I could breathe? Did this have anything to do with my being a disabled person with a generally perceived lower quality of life?

With AB 374, the experience of terminal illness and disability due to pain or loss of control are reasons enough to justify suicide which the proponents would rather have us believe is "compassionate choice" or "death with dignity." But where is the choice and where is the compassion in the context of a profit-driven health care system? Where is the dignity in death when living is shortchanged with an inadequate health care system?

Already, a lot of people with disabilities are at the mercy of their families and care-givers. Often, their only remaining protection is their relationship of trust with their medical doctors. But AB 374 would also end that protection.

Gone would be the protection for thousands of doctors who want to preserve their commitment to the Hippocratic Oath - that solemn and noble promise to heal the ailing human being. That protection, currently enshrined as the highest value in medicine, will now be replaced by the lie of "choice."

The good faith standard that currently protects our doctors would be eroded, creating for them a moral turbulence that compromises the practice and profession of medicine. Instead of worrying only about how to heal people and make them well, they will have to worry about being sued for not killing people when they supposedly ask to be killed! This cuts to the core of the very definition of who a medical doctor is and creates for the profession, incredible moral confusion.

Finally, AB 374 is an affront to the disability experience the way the Disability Rights Movement has defined it --- a positive civil rights struggle. Thousands of people with disabilities live the challenges of disability and chronic pain as a normal part of the human existence. Because of this, we now have at the service of humanity enormous contributions of amazing therapies and a dizzying array of inventions and assistive technology that enable the blind to "see," the mobility impaired to "walk," those with cancer to "live" fruitful lives.

When humanity decides that pain and suffering are not to fear and end but to conquer and tame, enormous therapies and scientific possibilities come about. Thousands of us in fact, are engaged everyday in the valiant struggle to enforce the rights of people with disabilities and insist on the respect we deserve.

AB 374 negates the better choice to live and is a cowardly response to pain and suffering. It is the highest form of discrimination to accept and institutionalize as acceptable, the insidious process of exterminating the disabled population.

Lillibeth Navarro, a parishioner at Precious Blood Church in Los Angeles, is a disability rights activist and founding director of Communities Actively Living Independent & Free, an independent living center serving the Central Los Angeles area and financed with the help of a Catholic Campaign for Human Development grant. She can be reached at (213) 627-0477, or lnavarro@calif-ilc.org.